I was thinking more about generating a loop current while passing through the intense mag field, then applying the right hand rule to get thrust direction.There are several basic rules of magnetic fields. Among them:
- No arrangement of permanent magnets alone can levitate an object.
(I know, it's hard to believe but it's true. There must be at least one physical constraint to prevent the magnet from flipping over and slamming into the magnet below. Levitated trains use variable fields to maintain the levitation.)
Another one is:
- Travel in space using magnetic fields can only take one parallel to the field lines. In other words you could travel along the field lines towards either of the magnetic poles of Jupiter but then you could only return and it would be along the same path you went there.
Given some method of moving across field lines one could then choose a path towards a pole of Jupiter, coast for awhile, then accelerate towards Saturn along another field line. At some distance you would have to turn off your magnet and glide as eventually it would return you to Jupiter's opposite pole.
As for using the magnetic field of Jupiter to bend light, that would not work. EM waves do not respond to magnetic fields. This is a great advantage of gamma ray observatories, they know where the gamma ray came from. This is not so with charged particle detectors, they have no idea of the point of origin.
View: https://imgur.com/gallery/dWJRllL
Where there's a will....Helio, please look at my post #37. Light sails are dead duck, except for real tiny tiny ones with real tiny tiny cameras.
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I have no delusions a solar sail could permit interstellar travel by humans. In an article in The Economist* (mentioned in wiki article on Breakthrough Starshot) "at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by several orders of magnitude."billslugg, are you sure that, at quoted energy figures, the sails are not going to be damaged? What thickness and weight figures are you using for the sails compared with my post #37?
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Is that the input wattage at the sail or the output light wattage of the "leyser" (light-geyser)? But either way, I agree, it is too much energy I think for any sail, that is, any "one" sail. Perhaps several layers of sails would be required so that the last one isn't vaporized.The proposal is to put 100 GW onto a 5 meter diameter sail for about ten seconds, delivering a Terajoule of energy. An excellent mirror only absorbs 1% of the incident energy. This would be a gigawatt for ten seconds absorbed by a few grams of matter. No way.